This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Read both the earlier piece and this second and concluding commentary, very good indeed. There are other factors at play, Obama's strutting egoism or narcissism (or whatever it is, more precisely) seems a very real factor, but this is a very solid review of some salient aspects that continue to worm their way into so many aspects of Obama and the international order in general. An excerpt from the earlier piece:
"Obama has rejected that change; for that he was cheered on by a generation who grew up believing that deformity is beauty and ideological lunacy is the norm. But instead of moving forward, Mr. Obama puts America’s gears in reverse and regresses to a romanticized leftist image of the past in which the U.S.A. is typecast as the archetypal reactionary villain battling the forces of progress. Only in this remake of the cult Cold War classic, America finally sees the light, feels remorseful, and surrenders — to critical acclaim from anal-retentive leftists trained to feel guilty for every joyful moment of living in a capitalist society."
[...]
"But abandoning pro-American forces and propping up anti-American dictators can’t really be what the word “change” meant to most voters during the elections. What is happening now looks more like restoring Cold War front lines and defecting to the other side, presumably in the name of correcting historical injustice. It’s similar to the psychiatric method of regressing to an earlier stage of the patient’s life in order to relive old traumatic experience with a more positive outcome."
There is a nearby piece by David Solway as well, which serves to hi-light a rather prominent backdrop: Iran and its nuclear ambitions.
It is the Carteresque echoes, the naivete and the results therefrom, that very much have me worried. After Carter and after the political/media/propaganda defeat of Vietnam, we experienced both what analyst Michael Lind termed the Revolutionary Wave Effect (e.g., Benin, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua) and the Bandwagon Effect (e.g., Khomeini's theocratic revolution, most notably). That and the murderous results were bad enough in that era. But in this current era, with a nuclear NorKor and Iran in the very near future, the results could be catastrophically worse, on a more massive scale. That is said not to invoke any type of reactionary attitudes much less any alarmism and fear, but it seems entirely germane and probative given what is occurring in Obama's administration on a variety of different levels (from Samantha Power to Obama himself).
(To further underscore the general credibility of such themes, historian John Lewis Gaddis conceived the Bandwagon Effect as "the psychological domino effect." And before anyone sneers about the much maligned "domino effect" of the Vietnam era itself, two things come more immediately to mind, 1) the reflections above, Angola, Nicaragua, etc. and 2) even with S.E. Asia itself, it was the contiguous states of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia - states that were additionally contiguous with China - that did in fact fall and that resulted in millions of murders and destroyed lives, families and social/cultural units in general, most often those murders were effected via en masse executions.)
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Read both the earlier piece and this second and concluding commentary, very good indeed. There are other factors at play, Obama's strutting egoism or narcissism (or whatever it is, more precisely) seems a very real factor, but this is a very solid review of some salient aspects that continue to worm their way into so many aspects of Obama and the international order in general. An excerpt from the earlier piece:
"Obama has rejected that change; for that he was cheered on by a generation who grew up believing that deformity is beauty and ideological lunacy is the norm. But instead of moving forward, Mr. Obama puts America’s gears in reverse and regresses to a romanticized leftist image of the past in which the U.S.A. is typecast as the archetypal reactionary villain battling the forces of progress. Only in this remake of the cult Cold War classic, America finally sees the light, feels remorseful, and surrenders — to critical acclaim from anal-retentive leftists trained to feel guilty for every joyful moment of living in a capitalist society."
[...]
"But abandoning pro-American forces and propping up anti-American dictators can’t really be what the word “change” meant to most voters during the elections. What is happening now looks more like restoring Cold War front lines and defecting to the other side, presumably in the name of correcting historical injustice. It’s similar to the psychiatric method of regressing to an earlier stage of the patient’s life in order to relive old traumatic experience with a more positive outcome."
There is a nearby piece by David Solway as well, which serves to hi-light a rather prominent backdrop: Iran and its nuclear ambitions.
It is the Carteresque echoes, the naivete and the results therefrom, that very much have me worried. After Carter and after the political/media/propaganda defeat of Vietnam, we experienced both what analyst Michael Lind termed the Revolutionary Wave Effect (e.g., Benin, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua) and the Bandwagon Effect (e.g., Khomeini's theocratic revolution, most notably). That and the murderous results were bad enough in that era. But in this current era, with a nuclear NorKor and Iran in the very near future, the results could be catastrophically worse, on a more massive scale. That is said not to invoke any type of reactionary attitudes much less any alarmism and fear, but it seems entirely germane and probative given what is occurring in Obama's administration on a variety of different levels (from Samantha Power to Obama himself).
(To further underscore the general credibility of such themes, historian John Lewis Gaddis conceived the Bandwagon Effect as "the psychological domino effect." And before anyone sneers about the much maligned "domino effect" of the Vietnam era itself, two things come more immediately to mind, 1) the reflections above, Angola, Nicaragua, etc. and 2) even with S.E. Asia itself, it was the contiguous states of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia - states that were additionally contiguous with China - that did in fact fall and that resulted in millions of murders and destroyed lives, families and social/cultural units in general, most often those murders were effected via en masse executions.)